Wednesday, July 29, 2015

When I heard Paul Thomas Anderson
was making a movie from Thomas Pynchon’s novel inherentVice, I was
tickled. I knew nothing about Anderson’s filmmaking, but I have been reading
Pynchon devotedly since Gravity’sRainbow was published. It gratified me
to know a movie by a noted director would bring Pynchon’s writing to new
audiences. I looked forward to the movie for months. Yet I did not expect the
movie to satisfy me. Even Pynchon’s simplest writing challenges his readers in
uncommon ways and would challenge a film maker no less.

On the way to the theater, we
listened to a podcast interview with the director. Anderson described the movie
as the story of the ex-lover you remain devoted to. His description confirmed
my expectation that the movie would not tell the story on the same levels as
the novel did. Watching the movie, I was struck by the near total absence of
the book’s political themes. In the podcast, the interviewer had raised the
question of 60s influences on Pynchon’s style and themes. This question nagged
me. He mentioned names like Lenny Bruce, but not Herbert Marcuse or Chairman
Mao, whom the novel actually mentions. I want to discuss this political
blindspot and the resultant difference between the stories Pynchon and Anderson
tell.

Politics figures in the novel on
two levels. The first level of politics is explicit. On several occasions, characters interpret experiences in terms of
“capitalism.” In their mouths, “capitalism” indicates their political
consciousness and thereby frames the story as political from their own
perspective. On several other occasions, private eye Doc Sportello’s
investigations turn up lengthier background histories of characters and
organizations. These explicitly political histories reveal deadly forces of
covert repression that threaten Doc, his clients and friends. On a second,
implicit level of politics, the dynamics of capitalism pervade the characters’
very feelings and their relationships. The explicit examples of politics suggest
the political themes that permeate every aspect of the novel and demonstrate
how Anderson’s adaptation systematically elides these fundamental themes.

On the level of explicit
politics, Doc Sportello, his lawyer Sauncho Smilax and the sex worker Jade,
whom Doc befriends, each interpret particular experiences in terms of
capitalism. For Doc, capitalism defines
the values that govern his complex relationship to the police, his most
important relationship in the novel. After talking to a witness about the
disappearance of real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, Doc finds police detective
Bigfoot Bjornson waiting for him. They talk, and once Bigfoot leaves, Doc works
out that Bigfoot must have lost a partner and, torn up by that loss, now works
alone. The narrator elaborates in language that mirrors Doc’s thoughts, “This
bond between partners was nearly the only thing Doc had ever found to admire
about the LAPD. … No faking it, not question of buying it with favors, money,
promotions – the entire range of capitalist inducement couldn’t get you five
seconds of attention to your back when it really counted, you had to go out
there and earn it … .” Relations conducted on capitalism’s terms cannot secure
care and devotion. Doc prizes these intimate social values and the kind of
relationships that can only thrive outside capitalism. These emotional
consequences of capitalism and their significance for the pursuit of justice
form one of the novel’s main themes on the deeper political level.

Doc’s lawyer Sauncho Smilax watches
tv absorbedly while stoned and often interprets his viewing for Doc. During a
visit to fill Doc in on information he has gathered about the schooner Golden
Fang, an animated ad for
StarKist tuna unnerves Sauncho. The ad features Charlie the Tuna in his
ongoing attempts to impress the cannery StarKist with his cultural tastes and
ends as always with the punchline, “StarKist wants tunas that taste good, not
tunas with good taste.” Sauncho explains the ad’s distressing premise, “Charlie
really has this, like, obsessive death
wish! Yes! He wants to be caught,
processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist!
Suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be
happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking
us on the shelves of supermarket America, and subconsciously the horrible thing
is, is we want them to do it … .” Sauncho’s
absurd outburst expresses his fear of an unthinking acquiescence in the
destructive exigencies of commodified work and commodified pleasures. These
further emotional consequences of capitalism also form one of the novel’s
deeper political themes.

The sex worker Jade might seem
less likely to grasp her subjection to capitalism conceptually. Sauncho has,
after all, gone to college and law school. Doc at least went to community
college. Jade, on the other hand, went to prison. But a consciousness of
capitalism as an exploitative, oppressive system is common in Doc’s circles. On
the night of Doc’s second meeting with the missing sax player Coy Harlingen, Jade
rides back to town with Doc and his buddy Denis. She tells the story of her
criminal and sexual career and cautions the men, “Just be advised, boys, …
you’ll want watch your step, ‘cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter
pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism – lowlifes
of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it’ll be them
who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol’ pearl
herself goes a-rollin on.” Jade responds to a society and a job that make her
accessible to men and to their abuse by hardening her feelings. This choice
allows her to protect herself as well as to inflict harm on those who would
abuse her. The interdependent emotional consequences of physical, emotional and economic dependence,
exploitation and abuse, form another of the novel’s root political themes.

In their reflection on personal
relations in day-to-day capitalism, the characters of the novel express their
interest in living relationships with emotional substance beyond self-interest,
in finding gratification in activities beyond isolated consumption, and in
shaping their own lives to protect themselves. Their political consciousness
and the character traits it divines and guides are lost in the movie. So too is
the inescapable impact on them of the repressive networks and institutions that
enforce private control over property and lives. On the novel’s explicitly
political level, two nexuses of these repressive force interconnect Doc, his
friends and clients. The schooner Golden Fang and the murderous loan shark
Adrian Prussia embody these deadly networks. Doc’s investigations reveal these
focal points of power, and they emerge bit by bit in the narrative until their histories
are extensively disclosed. The movie omits the political histories that make
sense of the ship and the loan shark and the plots lines involving them.

Doc’s investigation of the
schooner Golden Fang spans more of the story than all but one of his
commissioned cases. The movie retains the gradual introduction of the Golden
Fang: a note Jade leaves for Doc that closes
“Beware the Golden Fang”, a shadow apparently passing in the waterfront fog
behind the first conversation between Doc and Coy Harlingen, and the restaurant
meeting between Doc and Sauncho where the lawyer introduces the ship’s history. Uncharacteristically, the movie even keeps
the initial mention of the schooner’s political connection. The boat once
belonged to actor Burke Stodger, who sails
away on it when he is blacklisted. Anderson even explains the meaning of the
blacklist for the viewers, adding to
Sauncho’s account the gloss that Stodger was “branded a Communist.” However, we
hear little more than this simple fact, as the movie excises the boat’s
subsequent history.

Later in the same chapter of he novel, Fritz
Drybeam, a loan collector who gave Doc his first job as an investigator and
remained a friend, has retrieved this history from the ARPAnet, precursor of
the internet. Stodger handed the boat over to the government as part of the
deal that allowed him to return to work in Hollywood. This much of Fritz’s information Anderson
transfers to Sauncho in the restaurant scene. But Fritz’s account continues. The schooner
reappeared off Cuba on a spy mission “against Fidel Castro.” Later it was
deployed on “anti-Communist projects” in Guatemala, West Africa, Indonesia and
elsewhere. It monitored radio traffic, delivered weapons to “anti-Communist
guerillas, including those at the ill-fated Bay of Pigs.” It ran “CIA heroin”
and also took on as cargo “abducted local ‘troublemakers,’ who were never seen
again.” The Golden Fang’s history recapitulates decades of the covert
repression conducted by the U.S. government against insurgent Communists and nationalists
and against its own citizenry. These operations drive the events of the plot. The
Golden Fang and the network of government agencies and propertied interests that
operates it produce the disrupted lives that Doc investigates.

The exposition of Adrian
Prussia’s career is more confusingly abbreviated in the movie. Neither
limousine driver Tito Stavrou, who first mentions Prussia, nor Doc’s former boss Fritz Drybeam, who
provides personal knowledge of Prussia’s ties to the LAPD, even appear in the
movie. Prussia is introduced in the restaurant scene in which Bigfoot Bjornsen
points Doc to Prussia and his Nazi biker henchman Puck in connection with Coy
Harlingen’s faked overdose death. As much of Prussia’s history as we are
allowed comes in the scene in which Doc’s lover, assistant district attorney
Penny Kimball provides him with a sealed file on Prussia’s collaboration with
the LAPD. From these records we learn that Prussia was responsible for the
murder of Bigfoot Bjornsen’s partner, Detective Vincent Indelicato, that he commited
the murder for the LAPD, and that in fact “he might as well have been working
for them as a contract killer.” The movie leaves the history of LAPD’s
collusion with Prussia at this.

The novel expands on this history
and its explicitly political character. In the novel’s climactic scene Adrian
Prussia and Puck Beaverton have abducted Doc and are preparing to murder him.
Puck cruelly toys with Doc before preparing a fatal injection of heroin for
him. We see this scene in the movie, but we do not hear Puck recount how
Prussia became LAPD’s contract killer. A small-time pornographer threatened
Governor Reagan’s administration with a blackmail scheme that would have
brought it down. To defend Reagan’s career, the Vice Squad commissions Prussia
to kill the would-be blackmailer. Adrian arranges a particularly perverse and
gruesome murder. The loan shark is
politically conservative and finds that killing for the sake of his political
values gives him a “cold keen-edge thrill” with “something sexy about it.”

Exhilerated
by this illicit pleasure, Adrian “felt like his life had turned a corner.” He
embraces his new-found career and happily continues to sell his services to the
LAPD. Over the years he “found himself
specializing in politicals – black and Chicano activists, antiwar protestors,
campus bombers, and assorted other pinko fucks.” When the LAPD asks him to kill
a cop, however, the prospect gives Adrian no pleasure, so he hands the job over
to Puck, who has particular grounds to despise Detective Indelicato. The
omission of this information eliminates the parallel between the covert
anti-insurgency conducted from the Golden Fang and the assassinations carried
out by Adrian Prussia. It eliminates indications that these foreign and
domestic operations are branches of a single network. It also eliminates the
defense of his political values as a powerful motive beyond personal animosity
and desperate self-preservation for Doc’s readiness to kill Adrian and Puck.

The movie consistently excludes
the novel’s explicit political themes at the expense of coherence and depth in
the story. The characters lose features, the plot loses motivation and
continuity, and the thematic framework loses conceptual integrity. I could
present further evidence for Anderson’s treatment of the novel’s politics, but
this brief comparison establishes the point clearly enough. The anti-capitalist
perspectives voiced by Doc, Sauncho and Jade broach themes that generate the
novel’s implicit political substance. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s speculative
thought on the shaping of the psyche by the relations and processes of
capitalist production, in the second part of these comments we will next look
at how these deeper political themes fare in Anderson’s adaptation.